Editorial: Verdict still out on Iraq, but lessons learned

Thursday

Dec 29, 2011 at 12:01 AMDec 29, 2011 at 9:11 AM

The withdrawal of the last U.S. forces from Iraq has occasioned a lot of retrospection about our nearly nine-year military involvement there. There’s much to consider: 4,485 U.S. service members and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, nearly 3 mil­lion Iraqis turned into refugees at home or abroad, and roughly $1 trillion in U.S. government spending (not count­ing our future obligations for caring for wounded veterans).

The withdrawal of the last U.S. forces from Iraq has occasioned a lot of retrospection about our nearly nine-year military involvement there. There’s much to consider: 4,485 U.S. service members and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, nearly 3 mil­lion Iraqis turned into refugees at home or abroad, and roughly $1 trillion in U.S. government spending (not count­ing our future obligations for caring for wounded veterans).

First and foremost, we must thank those service members who fought, par­ticularly those who were injured. And we must remember those who were killed and honor their families’ sacri­fices. They served their country and they, more than all of us, bore and will continue to bear the costs of this war.

Nothing diminishes what they did, but their service only emphasizes the natural question: Was it all worth it?

There’s no easy answer to that simple question. If in 10 or 15 years, Iraq is a functioning democracy, friendly to the United States and respectful of the rights of religious and ethnic minori­ties, we may be able to say yes, despite the high cost. But maybe not, if the result is merely the tradeoff of one au­thoritarian, anti-American regime for another.

While we wait for that verdict of his­tory, there’s no shortage of lessons to be drawn now. We have learned that intelligence in the service of politics can be pretty dumb. We have learned that journalists should not stop asking hard questions for fear of appearing to be unpatriotic. And we learned — or at least we should have learned — the pit­falls of American “exceptionalism.”

American exceptionalism is the belief that this country has a unique, God-giv­en role in the world, that we inherently act in moral ways and that our history and our institutions provide a guide for the rest for the world to follow. It was that sense of exceptionalism that led war planners to convince themselves that occupying Americans would be welcomed with open arms and there was no need to plan for an anti-Ameri­can insurgency.

It was that attitude that led our lead­ers to assume that history did not apply — to deny, against the evidence, the possibility of sectarian strife in post-Saddam Iraq — or to see history solely through the prism of our own experi­ence, assuming that the administration of Iraq would be just like the U.S. oc­cupation of Germany and Japan after World War II. The hubris with which our country approached the war was massive, and the failure to recognize other perspectives had tragic conse­quences for Americans and Iraqis.

Further, while the planners of the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq considered themselves conservatives, they abandoned their conservative principles, as Peter Beinart wrote for The Daily Beast, when it came to U.S. policy there. That is, people who argue strongly against government social en­gineering at home, who hold that gov­ernment is inherently “dumb,” believed that an American administration could overcome centuries of tradition and di­vision in Iraq and, in a few short years, turn the country into a model of free­dom and tolerance for the Middle East.

They learned the hard way the axiom “ culture trumps politics” applies just as much abroad as it does at home.

So whatever the verdict of history about Iraq, we have this lesson to study at home: to take care in analyzing why and when we should intervene around the world, with particular awareness of the danger of personal or national hubris driving decisions that can cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives.

Holland (Mich.) Sentinel

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